The Hunt for the Worst Movie of All TimeHilarious feature (or whatever you call on it) on Videogum, which I can only assume is an entertainment blog of some sort. Honestly, I don't even give a fuck about the rest of the website, but the HWMoAT is totally worth reading at least a spattering of. Seriously. Here, I'll show you:
The "movie" (for lack of a better term) has some of my favorite sci-fi tropes. For example, the Psychlos consider humans to be unintelligent animals who are only good for slave labor and murdering. Fair enough. But then the Psychlos also have "executive assistants" (Forest Whitaker) and get drunk in bars and say things like "you're too much." They also dress the slave alien "man animals" in camo-green jumpsuits, because that's what you do with a creature that you consider to have no value. You dress it efficiently. I also love how when humans are deprived of civilization after an Apocalyptic event they regress to the king's English: "Hope is an admirable quality, but foolishness is not." Before the movie was released, John Travolta described it as being "like Pulp Fiction for the year 3000." What? I don't even know what that means. I guess I missed the director's cut of Pulp Fiction in which John Travolta played a retarded alien with dreadlocks and a sassy effeminate attitude.
I had always heard that this movie was about Scientology, but I don't think that's true. Nothing really seems to back that up, least of all the movie itself. I'm pretty sure the only religion this movie could subliminally endorse is the religion of throwing your DVD player out the window. Even Tom Cruise supposedly warned Warner Brothers that it was "a bad idea," and he failed out of Recognizing Bad Ideas School. But I did some background research on the project, and the whole endeavor is epic. It was largely financed by a production company called Franchise Entertainment, run by a guy named Elie Samaha who said "[Battlefield Earth] is going to make people in Hollywood take notice of Elie Samaha. I'm not going to be the laughing stock any more." Whoops. It later turned out that Samaha inflated the budget of the film to embezzle money from his investors resulting in an FBI investigation and the collapse of Franchise Entertainment. Amazing. This movie actually ruined lives.
I even highlighted the bits that I found the most hilarious for your browsing ease. Now, I realize its very easy to make fun of a movie so laughably bad as Battlefield Earth, but trust me when I say there are many many gems to be found, and each one is special in its own special way. Check it out.
